How To Break a Bad Habit Right Now

Most of us have a difficult time breaking existing habits when we take the brute force approach: "I'm going to change this aspect of how I live within the next week… month… or several months"

Most of the time it just doesn't work.

However we are capable of creating and achieving productive goals — like we are also capable of breaking negative habits. The problem occurs when we go about it expecting instant results and punishing ourselves when we don't get them.

Overriding Bad Habits

The reason that bad habits are so difficult to override is that on a deeper level we gain a sense of emotional satisfaction from doing the action. It's a pleasant feeling each time we continue the habit.

This positive reinforcement that goes on makes it difficult to break the habit.

If it's smoking… the reinforcement might be a sense of relaxation. If it's chewing on a pen… the reinforcement might be a sense of comfort. If it's gambling the reinforcement might be a sense of achievement.

Steps to Break a Habit Right Now

Use a notepad or a digital journal to write down what the bad habit is.
Then write down what the desired goal is — is it to abolish the habit altogether or just to reduce the amount of time being involved in that specific action?
Choose a positive reinforcement — choose a reward for avoiding action.
Decide on a negative reinforcement — what shall be the consequences each time this action is carried out?
Decide on some milestones that need to be reached to receive the positive reinforcement reward.

For example if I was attempting to quit smoking I could write down this goal and then set up some milestones and reinforcements.

Recording Progress: I write down each time I smoke a cigarette to record progress towards the goal. Negative Reinforcement: For each cigarette smoked I will surrender a $5 bill and place it in a cabinet or coinbox. Positive Reinforcement: If at the end of the week I have smoked less than half the amount that I did the previous week I can open the coin box and return the $5 bills.

The negative reinforcement can be whichever action is taken after the habitual action that provides a negative response (e.g. having to give up a bit of cash). Over time the mind associates smoking (or whatever the target behaviour is) with something negative as a result of the negative reinforcement.

The positive reinforcement for cutting down an existing habit causes the mind to associated a reward for avoiding that specific action. Positive reinforcements should be placed at milestones earlier on in the process.

For example a positive reinforcement could be "for each morning that I wake up before 10am I will…" if the aim is to maintain a goal of waking up earlier. The positive reinforcement then would be "… purchase something I've been wanting for a while" or "go out for lunch" or another positive reward.

If the aim is to wake up before 8 a.m. then some positive reinforcements could be -

I've woken up before 9am at least 3 times in this week.
I've woken up before 10am on Mon-Fri this week.
Etc.

You could select rewards for each of the above milestones being met.

Saturation

One other method of breaking a bad habit is using saturation until the positive reinforcement behind the habit becomes exhausted. This is not useful in all cases but it can be helpful in some.

For example imagine that the habit we want to break is "eating hamburgers and fries" for several meals throughout the week. Using saturation one would eat hamburgers and fries for breakfast and lunch and dinner all week until she got sick of it.

The effect that saturation has is that we over-do the bad habit so much that it loses its grip over us. You can't even look at hamburgers after saturation … as an example. This works with a number of negative habits — but it cannot be applied in all circumstances (e.g. saturation should never be used with gambling addiction for example).

StumbleUpon - Twitter - Facebook

Free meditation course

Join 184 subscribers

Latest Posts